How to start your (free) YouTube Channel

Start with the basics

The first thing you’ll need to do is actually create your business channel, and YouTube makes it incredibly easy to do. With just a couple of clicks, you’ll be ready to dive into setting up your new channel.

Sign into YouTube and click on the user icon at the top right of the screen

Click on the gear icon to get to your account’s YouTube Settings

Click on Create a new channel

Then choose “Use a business or other name”

Add your Brand name and click create

Fill in the about section

Next, you’ll want to fill out your profile and channel description; this is the first option you see after you have created a channel. Here, you should describe your brand and what viewers can expect to see on your channel. This is also a great place to add links to your website and other social media networks that you use. This description will appear in more than one place on your channel, so be sure to put your best foot forward when filling it out!

Channel your art

When you go to a YouTube channel, you’ll immediately be greeted with a large banner displaying the channel name. This is your cover photo and is prime real estate for introducing your brand.

You can make your cover photo as extravagant or minimal as you’d like, but just make sure that your brand is the focal point, as it’s going to be the first impression someone gets upon entering. Luckily, there are a great assortment of tools to get you started if you don’t happen to be a seasoned graphic designer. Friendly reminder: YouTube recommends uploading your cover photo at 2560 x 1440 pixels with a maximum file size of 4MB.

Know your market, know your content type

Since you’re starting a YouTube channel for your own business, you should have more than enough source material to work with, and you can approach your video content in more than one way.

If you have a complex product and want to empower your customers to learn more about it, video tutorials might be a great avenue for you. Want to show off great reviews from your customers? Testimonials may be the way to go. Even better, do both! This way, your channel has a variety of content to consume, which can resonate with different viewers.

You should also create content that’s aimed at your target demographic of your business. The more that you cater to your target market, the more likely they will want to look into your business services.

Lights, camera, trailer!

Like your channel art, you’ll also want to create your channel trailer. Channel trailers are usually short and sweet, and are a good introduction for new visitors. You can let your audience know who you are, what your business is all about and what kind of content they can expect to see in the future. Creating your channel trailer will also be good practice leading up to your first video.

Upload your first (official) video

At this point, you’ve probably done a fair amount of research about your first video, and if you already have your channel trailer under your belt, you have a bit of practice as well! Now it’s time to take and say “action.”

Once you’re done filming and editing your first video, it’s time to upload it. Given that YouTube relies on video uploads, you’ll find the upload option at the top right of the screen when you log into your account.

You’re not done yet, though!

Optimize for search

When uploading a video, you’ll be asked to fill in a title, description, and tags. These are essential components to have your video easily discoverable in YouTube search, so don’t skimp on them!

Much like SEO for your own website, YouTube has its own set of parameters for you to optimize your video for search. Fill these sections out to the best of your ability using keywords to describe the video and your business. A keyword-rich (but not heavy) title and description can go a long way and you’ll be able to see what works for your videos as you progress.

If your video is well optimized for YouTube itself, this can extend to search engines as well. As a Google-owned product, YouTube has tight integration with the search giant. If you play your cards right, you’ll find your videos ranking high on both YouTube and Google.

Stay consistent

Don’t expect success if you plan to create a YouTube channel, upload one video and then neglect it completely. Creating a successful YouTube channel takes time and effort, and viewers expect consistency from the channels that they subscribe to. After your first video, be sure to plan the next few videos ahead of time.

Unsure if you’ll have time to shoot a video every week or every other week? Not a problem! Take a day out of your schedule to shoot more than one video and release them on your own schedule.

Integrate your channel in your website and social

You have a website and now a YouTube channel. Great! Now it’s time to share your videos outside of YouTube and your website should be their first stop. Here are a couple of ways to showcase your videos on your website.

Front and center: Your videos take time and effort to create, so why not show them off? You can add your YouTube video to the home page on your website so it’s one of the first things that a visitor will see!

Blog all about it: If you have a blog on your website, then your YouTube videos have a home away from home now. You can embed them right into new blog posts and even tell your website subscribers by sending a newsletter!

Sync your website with your YouTube Channel or Playlist: You can easily add a YouTube feed to your Website. Every new video added to the channel or playlist you connect will be available on your Website!

Go Social: Take pride in your work and share your content on your business social networks. The more you share, the more exposure, and that’s what this is all about. Share it everywhere!

Engage with your community

YouTube wouldn’t be what it is today without viewers actively viewing and engaging with video content that businesses like yours and people like Whats On in Cyprus create, so make sure to engage back!

You need to build a community around your channel, and engaging with your viewers is a very important step. Reply to comments, ask and answer questions, and most importantly, listen to them! Your viewers want to watch your content, so remember to give them what they want.

With a well-nurtured community, you’ll likely get some free word of mouth advertising in the process, too.

Think about investing in YouTube ads

Ready to take things to the next level? At some point, you may want to look into investing into YouTube Advertisements to get your brand out there even further. Even if you’re not sure where to start, there’s a wealth of information available to you to get you where you need to go.

If you’re looking to target a specific age group, gender, interest, or location, YouTube Advertising can help you do it all.

It’s not imperative that you use YouTube ads, but it could very well be a suitable offering for your channel. Just remember that with the right combination of content and engagement, much of your growth will be organic. YouTube ads can just be the icing on the cake.

Analyze, optimize, repeat

Even the best can do better. Once you have a foothold on your channel, it’s time to get a bird’s-eye view of how it’s performing. YouTube Analytics will help you along the way and will guide you in the direction of how you may want to optimize your videos for the future.

Analytics will allow you to get insight on the people who are watching your videos, which allows you to hone into your target demographic even further. It’ll also give you a better idea as to why one video may have performed better than another. It’s a powerful tool for your budding channel.

Benefits of Using YouTube For Business

As a small business, you must continually think of ways to get your products and services in front of as many people as possible, all without breaking the bank.
Using YouTube for your business can be a cost-effective way to grow it, if used regularly as part of your marketing strategy.
1. Tap Into The Horde of YouTube’s Traffic
Online video is growing exponentially, with over 4 billion videos viewed daily. If you use YouTube for your business, you can easily reach your audience, both by creating videos and advertising on other people’s videos.
YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine and the 3rd most visited website worldwide, behind only Google and Facebook respectively.
1 billion people visit YouTube each month globally
100 hours of video are uploaded every 60 seconds to YouTube
According to Nielsen, YouTube reaches more US adults aged 18-34 than any cable network

Video-streaming platforms like YouTube have become so big you’re guaranteed to find a group of people who will become your raving fans and customers, as long as you educate, entertain and provide solutions to their problems.

2. Marketing On YouTube Will Help You Get Found On Google
Due to Google Universal Search, videos, images, news, books and local searches are blended together in Google’s search results, so as to provide the most useful information for people searching.
You might have noticed that videos are appearing more often in Google’s search results. This shows that Google considers video to be as important as text-only pages.
You can take advantage of this by writing high-quality articles on your site and creating complementary videos in YouTube. Doing this will build back links to your site, meaning you get found on Google more often by people searching.

By utilizing YouTube as part of your marketing strategy for your business, you’re also increasing the authority of your website. The more authoritative your website is in Google’s eyes, the higher all your pages will rank in the search results.

Fun fact: Over 60% of searchers click on the first 3 results on Google, and over 90% of all Google searchers click on the first 10 organic results.

3. Your Content Never Dies
Using YouTube for business can help you to re-purpose content you’ve already created without the need to spend a lot of time or to invest in expensive equipment.
Re-purposing content you have already created is an effective form of content marketing, as you can reach an audience that will love that particular type of content.

For example, this blog post, can easily be re-purposed into many formats including:

Podcasts
Infographics
Presentations
Video series

This approach enables you to create at least 4 pieces of content from just 1 idea, resulting in an engaged audience who can easily digest the information you provide for them.

4. Grow Your Audience Worldwide
This is one of the biggest benefits of using YouTube for business.
Consistently creating video content opens the door to new visitors who would never come across your business any other way. Through YouTube, you can reach a worldwide audience even if you only speak one language.
If you’re a native English speaker, you’re at an advantage, as it’s difficult to capture the huge English-speaking markets (30% of all YouTube views) if you can’t write or produce excellent content.
In addition to this, if you include closed-captions on your videos, you can also reach new audiences as you are catering to people with different needs.
Research now shows that videos with closed-captions receive 4% more views and subscribers than those without.

5. Build Your Email List in YouTube
Another benefit of using YouTube for business is the ability to build your email list as you continue to provide valuable, engaging content.
Use software that allows you to embed your sign-up form directly into YouTube videos. A video can be stopped temporarily for a viewer to enter their email address and subscribe to your list, before they continue.
Using this approach makes it easier than ever to build your email list, whilst providing engaging video content your audience will love.

6. Your Audience Will Promote You and Buy from You
Videos with a personal touch help to increase conversions. People buy from those they trust, and that trust is built by you relating to them on an emotional level.
Research now shows that, for professional services and general companies, if you are driving traffic to a landing page with a video of a person in the company speaking about the product or service, it can dramatically increase your list of leads and sales.

7. Target Your Audience with AdWords for Video
With Google AdWords for Video, you can get laser-focused access to your audience by advertising on videos your audience are more likely to watch and search for.

The biggest advantage of AdWords for Video is that you’ll only pay for engaged views.

An engaged view occurs when a viewer watches your ad for at least 30 seconds. In other words, if your video ad is skipped, you won’t pay anything.
The biggest benefit of AdWords for Video is the potential to grow your audience through ‘earned views’.
These views are free and are earned when someone who chooses to watch your video ad, then goes on to watch one or more videos on your YouTube channel within a 7-day period.

If someone watches 2-4 videos on your YouTube channel, they are far more likely to subscribe to your YouTube channel.
8. Make Money with AdSense for Video
Creating regular video content gives you the opportunity to earn some money directly from your videos, through Google’s AdSense for Video programme.
Facts:
Over 1 million content creators from 30 countries around the globe are earning money simply through YouTube videos
Thousands of channels are making six figures a year
You can use Google AdWords and AdSense for Video together to make some money back from your video campaigns too.

It works like this:

1) Viewer sees your video ad in another video and clicks on it.

2) You pay for that click as part of your campaign budget.

3) Viewer proceeds to watch your video, viewing the ads from other content creators that are enabled to display on your videos. (can be disabled)

4) Viewer clicks or watches those ads and you are paid 68% of the ad revenue.

This means that you can run AdWords campaigns for your videos, whilst making money by allowing others to advertise on your videos.

As you can see YouTube is a viable platform for growing your audience and business in a number of ways.

If you invest the required time to learn the main components of the platform, YouTube will show itself to be a worthwhile addition to grow

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